Perpetual Winter: The Deep Inn (24 page)

              “You, my dear, are that princess. Go and fall in love way up there, with your heart and with your flesh, so that there may be light in the firmament. Go, knowing that every day we will look at the night and know from the stars that your happiness endures.”

              Sofia hugged the grandmother she would never see again, swearing to her that she would be happy for herself and for her. She asked if she really had lost a toe when she was a baby and that it had grown back, like her late grandfather had told her in a whisper, but that her parents would never confirm. “Yes, dear,” her grandmother told her. “You are like me, a Suren.”

              She hugged her parents, telling them not to believe in people selling omens and that she would come back to them sooner than they thought. Her mother told her to take care of herself and to not take risks now that she knew of her gift of recovering from serious wounds. She promised to try. Sofia asked them one last thing. She had left a letter on the page with Tabriz in the old Persian atlas, in her grandmother’s house. It was important to send a digital copy of it to the White House, to the FBI, and to the CIA from a public computer so her family would not be at risk.

              Mariah received a visit from her parents. In Columbia, both she and Sofia were famous and everyone knew they’d been selected to go. Uncle Crane had died in an accident with his private jet, and they had abandoned the new house and gone back to the old one. Her father did not know if he should be thankful or ask forgiveness for having brought a fox-like Crane into the bosom of the family. He told her that her favorite uncle had lost his wife, a German geneticist at Max Planck, and their twelve-year-old daughter, who looked like she could have been Mariah’s twin, in an accident. One day, when Anthony Crane saw her in the street, he thought he was seeing his own daughter and followed her until coming up them. He got close to the family to get close to her. He had included her in the program to save her, is if she were his real daughter, without saying anything to her parents. Crane had left her a personal video message that her parents gave to her.

Chapter 20

The Collection

Sofia told Lucas that her friend Eric had been murdered, she was certain of it. She had an intuition. Everyone in Columbia knew she was going to Mars, which left her in the uncomfortable position of being “the chosen one.” Lucas confessed his surprise, since his going to Mars was a secret in Portugal. Not even the police knew.                                         

              When Mariah came back to the room, she put the USB 7.0 pen drive in her laptop. Crane was nervous and sweating. He told Mariah she was not a mutant and that he had falsified her genotype in order to trick Hendriks. He convinced him that she had genes which were variants of two photosynthetic pigments, xanthopterin and phycoerythrin, as well as modified chloroplasts. If they could manage to unrepress those genes, she would be able to do pink photosynthesis, diminishing her caloric needs by fifteen percent during the day. Crane felt a father’s affection for her, since Mariah seemed, both physically and personality-wise, like his daughter Mary, who he had lost when she was a child. He wanted to save her, if the destruction of the Earth were confirmed.

              Afterwards, Crane warned her of another ongoing threat. A few years ago, Tyrell Hendriks had initiated a program of embryonic fusion in the fantastic Deep Inn, his advanced military biotechnology laboratory in Houston, using sex cells that had been collected from seven members of the polar team and had recently included sperm from an eighth element, Lucas. Tyrell had been able to merge two processes found in nature:

              One was chimerism, very common, for example, in marmosets, which results in the fusion of two embryos in the mother’s uterus. When a marmoset is born, it has a mixture of cells from two siblings interwoven into just one—it is a chimera.

              The other process is sexual parasitism, frequent in certain fish, similar to the monkfish, from the ocean depths where light does not reach. In these sea demons, after birth, the minuscule male looks for, bites and fuses itself into a much larger female, dissolving his lips into her in an eternal kiss. He partially integrates himself into her body, fertilizing her throughout her life.

              One of the problems of achieving sexual parasitism in vertebrates is immunological rejection, since the male would be rejected as a foreign body by the female, as if it were an infection. By successfully bringing the two phenomena together in alter uterus, Hendriks got around the problem of rejection by creating almost twin brothers and sisters through chimerism. In other words, if the male were the result of a fusion of his own cells with those of a female who was also his sister and if that fusion between chimeras came about in a uterus during the embryonic phase, there would be no classic rejection.

              The only thing lacking was a uterus. That uterus was achieved using a humanized model of mountain goat. He added a cocktail to it to promote angiogenesis and it was successful until the tenth week of pregnancy. At that point, all of the goats miscarried the human chimeras because xenopregnancy still had issues to be resolved.

              What he did next was to join the chimera of two very young male embryos with the chimera of two older female embryos, achieving a new chimera, with the genetic material from four gametes: two eggs and two spermatozoids. The male chimeric parasite lives inside the female chimera, atrophying a large part of its organs, but preserving his reproductive organs.

              He first accomplished this in a marmoset. The male parasite is a chimera in which the cells of two males predominates but also has some female cells and lives in the female’s abdomen, which is a chimera predominantly of two females, but having some male cells. The parasite is inside the female’s abdomen, which seems normal, except for a slightly larger belly. The male is able to impregnate her consecutively. Each fusion female marmoset constantly has offspring from two fathers and two mothers. Almost as soon as it is through with one pregnancy, it begins another.

              The natural offspring that are not the result of implanting fusion embryos in the uterus are potentially normal babies, but they can have one of the two mothers and one of the two fathers of the four fused in the complex chimera. Their mothers are not normal and have a short life because they suffer from skin tumors and many autoimmune diseases, principally severe arthritis. All of the chimeras share that problem, those diseases that originate in the excessive acceptance or the excessive rejection of themselves. In a short time, the mothers suffer from ankylosis, with their joints destroyed by severe arthritis and poor eyesight caused by red eyes inflamed from successive uveitis, but continue having offspring until they die of cancer. The offspring, I repeat, are normal from the outset.

              He tested this in human embryos suffering an anomaly that was going to cause them to be born without a brain. He thought that, this way, he wouldn’t be accused of provoking suffering in people. It worked reasonably well. In addition to the tumors and arthritis, a secondary effect is that, in the case of human fusion, the first pregnancy occurs while still in the fetal phase: the baby chimera is born already pregnant, a little girl with a half-brother incorporated in her abdomen who has impregnated her while she was still a fetus. That pregnancy in the human model is always ectopic, or rather, takes place outside the uterus and Tyrell extracts it surgically. The first experiment failed because the baby was born pregnant and had a hemorrhage resulting from that pregnancy outside the uterus, something Tyrell had not expected.

              The advantage of this technique is that with a few combinations Hendriks can obtain children from of all the possible pairings of the eight of you. He doesn’t need to wait for the girls to reach puberty for them to get pregnant; they are born pregnant.

              He just has to collect the embryos from the chimeras’ pregnancies and make fusions in goat uteruses, open their bellies and put a twin half-brother there inside them and, finally, put them in the uterus of a girl chimera. And furthermore, since the female chimeras can be pregnant outside of the uterus, they can carry two pregnancies at the same time: one in the uterus and the other ectopic, in the belly but outside of the uterus, in which the father is the twin half-brother that lives there as a parasite. If the twin half-brother grows too much, Tyrell operates on the girl and takes the parasite out. Repeating these steps, in a short time, he hopes to achieve babies with all of the favorable mutations that you have. I’m convinced he’s close to obtaining the superhuman he has been seeking for so many years. I repeat: the chimeras result from the fusion of several embryos and, thus, are not normal, but they would give birth to normal babies—if Hendriks does not end the pregnancy, creating a new fusion. Said in another way, you will have daughters, granddaughters, great granddaughters, and great-great granddaughters that will be parasitic chimeras but from your great-great-great grandchildren on, normal children will be born; many great-great-great grandchildren in a short time and many of them will be genetically exceptional.

              I know it seems horrible to tell you, but the method is simple and quick. Much simpler than complex polygenic genetic manipulation. The only problem is that he used somatic cells in the initial phase, but later he was able to arrange your true germinative cells and, despite the variable quality, he corrected some accumulated errors and the process took an enormous leap in the viability of the last generation of chimeras. I was able to delay his use of your eggs for a few years, but in the end he demanded a fresh reserve of eggs and spermatozoids from the seven of you as well as from the Portuguese man who entered the program at the last minute. He would not have used your sexual cells if only I had revealed that you are not an interesting mutant but, rather completely normal. But if I did that, you would be excluded from the Mars transfer program and that, Mariah, would cost you your life. I lived a lie for many years and, at this time, I feel the obligation of telling you the truth.

              If the Earth is, in fact, destroyed, the chimeras will die. If not, I will conduct a crusade, whatever the risks, looking for him and all copies of his experiments that I can find. I promise you that just like I promise to protect your parents. You know I am strong. You will also need to be strong and you most go on to Mars because you are not safe on Earth. Now that he has your genes, Tyrell will use the first excuse available to rid himself of all of you. Despite the bad news, you have a hypothesis of surviving that my daughter did not have and that we will not have. I envy you, my dear daughter, and wish you all the luck possible in the new world.

              Mariah stopped for a moment to imagine her parasitic daughters pregnant by her sons, in a continued and blind incest, being born already pregnant with embryos having the same destiny. She doubted that Anthony Crane’s plane crash had been an accident and she realized that Tyrell Hendriks, on his own scale, was not much better as a person than the German Ogre from the last century’s thirties and forties who he so derided.

              She did not shed a tear. She called the entire group together and only Steven did not appear. She showed the video. She and Sofia, who finally realized that she had been used by Crane to help save Mariah, had to explain more than once the complex logic of the fusion planned by Hendriks. He was sacrificing three or four generations of beings who would never understand their tragedy because they would die of cancer, great-great grandparents before their childhoods’ end, pregnant from pregnant fetuses, ankylosed by arthritis and infested with parasites who were their half-siblings. What Hendriks wanted, his desired new man, would finally be born with a complete menu of Mariah’s and the seven mutants’ genes.

              Andrew was from Houston and remembered where the old “Deep Inn” was. He didn’t know if it was Hendriks’ and couldn’t guarantee that it was the same “fantastic laboratory” Crane had spoken of, but it wasn’t far from there. He had visited there while a teenager in his deviant period of computer piracy. It wasn’t far. He remembered how to get in and details about the access code generating system as if it were today. Hendriks had surely changed the codes, but he might not have changed the code generating program. After all, he was a doctor and not a computer scientist.

              Pierre remarked that the tape showed the destruction of earth was real; otherwise, Crane wouldn’t have involved Mariah, sending her to Mars. His embryos would then die. Andrew was convinced Crane’s testimony was dubious because, in the video, he had insisted on another danger—their persecution by Hendricks. Lucas was very disturbed, saying he wouldn’t let a murderer use him to create children in a lab. He decided to annihilate the Deep Inn, even if it meant not going to Mars. Sofia strongly agreed: she wanted no children of hers in the hands of that psychotic. They all decided to attack the lab.

              Larissa and Caroline stayed to create a distraction. The other five left after sunset. It was foggy and they hadn’t reached the base’s outer limits when they were surrounded by plain clothes agents from a special armed force. When the five mutants were detained on the outskirts of the Spaceport, they had already shaken off the regular military police that maintained the installation’s security. Lucas almost managed to escape, rolling into a ditch but he was intercepted by the force’s commander, with a pistol in his left hand, whose face was uncovered. He had a totally white eye and, smiling, seemed to be particularly attentive to Lucas’s movements. “Throw your gun on the ground, boy,”
the commander ordered him. They were detained, handcuffed, gagged, and placed in leg irons. The group’s leader introduced himself as Nolan Dimmick, declaring that he would solve all their problems. They were being pushed into a vehicle when two black jeeps with smoked windows and electric motors emerged from the fog, as if out of nowhere. Six men, with dark glasses in the middle of the night and expressionless faces as if they were playing poker, got out of the jeep. They were wearing suits and ties and wielded pistols with silencers. Nolan reacted and killed one, but the others immediately put down all of their kidnappers. Dimmick would not be going home next Christmas.

              Four of the agents released them and told them to disappear from the base. Because they had violated quarantine, they would now not be able to leave for Mars. When the mutants moved away, they saw a fifth agent fire three shots into Nolan Dimmick’s face. He had violated some of those people’s rules and they had prevented him from having an open casket funeral, so common in the South. No funeral agency would be able to reconstruct his disfigured features.

              They left the Spaceport and ducked underneath a viaduct where they discussed their situation. Whoever it was that had attacked them wanted to eliminate them without anyone knowing. They could have been a force with official access to the Spaceport or have entered the base clandestinely. But whoever had saved them did not want them leaving for Mars either, since they had thrown them off the base.

              “But someone has to want us to go,” Pierre said. “Otherwise, we wouldn’t be here in the first place.

              “You’re right,” Andrew concluded. “There have to be three antagonistic groups.”

              “And at least one of them is playing both sides against the other, which is why they wanted to make us disappear without leaving any signs,” Pierre added.

              “Caroline and Larissa are in danger. I’ve got to find them,” Lucas reminded them.